10 Awesome Trailers That Tricked Us Into Seeing Awful Movies
3. 10,000 BC
Though Roland Emmerich had lost some of his shine after the atrocious Godzilla and the middling The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC looked like a departure for the director that was easy to be excited about.
After helming plenty of blockbusters set in the modern day, this trip to the distant past looked like a fresh start for the man, giving him a chance to muster some of that heart he found on Independence Day and transplant it into an exciting new setting that big-budget movies don't really explore.
The movie's trailer teased a creature-feature with an emotionally-weighty story and a new action hero for audiences to embrace, complete with a pulse-pounding score and several gratuitous shots of giant beasts attacking humans. That's always a win.
10,000 BC looked like it contained that beating heart that had been missing from Emmerich's movies for a while, but it never delivered on that.
While the director had shifted his focus to the prehistoric era, 10,000 BC was still the same loud, dumb blockbuster that we've now come to expect from him. The movie lacked substance and instead felt like a string of loosely-connected creature encounters, with no engaging threads pulling these scenes together.
Characters were cardboard, CGI was less-than impressive and the story was weak, and 10,000 BC confirmed what many had started to suspect; Independence Day was a fluke.